Posted
by
Zonk
on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @01:38PM
from the i-love-me-some-stats dept.

Alice's Wonderland blog is a daily read, and today she's got a weighty piece of research for us to check out. Gamers in the UK - Digital Play, Digital Lifestyles is research into the gaming habits of 3,442 citizens of the United Kingdom. Results are broken down by age category, with some interesting revelations in nearly every group. From the paper: "At 82%, gamers still form a clear majority of 16-24 year olds. 81% are 'heavy' gamers playing at least once a week, which may explain why the majority placed videogaming second in their preferred entertainment list (watching TV now coming in first). There are also more 'medium' gamers (14%) playing only a few times a month, than the two previous groups. This age group is also the one with the lowest proportion of female gamers at 44% - is this an indication that the choice of games targeted at this group is less appealing to females?"

While the studies don't surprise me either, a lot of psychology is finding out and documenting real results, rather than going off on the basis of cultural cliches. I certainly wouldn't deem this overly newsworthly, the study is valid and meaningful, rather than what the assumptions of the masses were.

Actually... Given the way they defined gamer (anybody that has played any sort of video game on any platform at all in the last six months), it's a safe bet that everybody in that age range qualifies. After all, they might be counting the games kids play in schools to help with learning (dunno how common those are in the UK). Besides, all these statistics end up with some level of skew based on sample size.

Heavy gaming is more then once per week? WTF? I would consider a heavy gamer someone who games most days. A casual once twice per week and anyone who plays less then once a week trivial.

You don't measure TV watching in this way do you? Perhaps it shows the researchers were still slanted against gaming being considered normal. It would explain the HUGE gap between this researchs heavy gamer group and the next one. If nearly everyone says they are a heavy user perhaps you defined heavy user wrong.

The poster asks about the medium users but I think the stats are so skewed and the difference so minimal that the only thing you can conclude from this is that men and women pretty much play the same games. Just that women game slightly less.

Considering the attitude that games are for men I find the small diffrences really revealing. Seems the old attitude that games are for the boys is just plain not true anymore.

What I think is really the case? That initially gaming was discovered by people of my generation (70s) and we kept it with us. Some older folks were of course intrested (who do you think wrote those games when I was a kid?) but fewer of them. As we moved on we introduced other people to gaming and slowly it spread. I can remember where if you talked to a person of the female gender they would never even have heard of quake let alone doom. Now they can kick your ass. There are still a lot of people who don't game but the hobby is spreading.

As for puzzle games being most popular? Well in a way yeah that is no wonder. If they count solataire. Even worse, mobile phone games. Nokia Snake alone must have been played more then any full price console/pc game.

We just had an article about games for females but I think they are barking up the wrong tree. These games already exist but the real gems are those games where we are not forced to think in current sexist views but we can be whoever we want to be.

MMORPG's are a lot of fun that way. I played with females who make me very very afraid and with males who act out characters so sweet they make japanese idols look like war veterans.

The Sims is perhaps another good example of male and female players being able to meet. I am a perverted sexist male running an all female co-ed lesbian house using sexy skins made by a female who likes to design pretty sims models (not easy in The Sims 2).

Over the years I have spoken to female flight sim nuts and males who spend hours designing hair meshes for The Sims. Games at their best allow us to have fun the way we want to. Long live the new age where you real live sex doesn't matter if you don't want to.

Wow. They had a bunch of categories, but they made a poor decision about where to draw the "heavy" line. Let's see who's a heavy gamer:

My mom, who works twelve hour hospital shifts and hasn't touched a console since pong, plays a puzzle game on her computer a little bit every day.

I spend half my waking life on the computer playing some game or another.

My roommate spends about as much time as me on MMOs.

My friend down the hall picks up an RTS for an hour or two every week.

My sister whips out her cell phone at least once a week for some of those little puzzle things.

My uncle boots up a DOS space shooter for an hour or two every week.

Heavy usage should be more than once a week, and it'd be better based on raw hours than number of times. Someone screwing around with solitaire a couple times a week is different from someone devoting entire weekends to MMOs.